Essays: September 2008 Archives

Sad but true: Noodle is sick. At music class Tuesday another baby was sneezing, and Nate developed a full-blown cold yesterday: stuffy nose, cough, a bit of stomach churn.

I'd been warned, and can confirm, that few things are sadder than a sick baby. He doesn't understand why he's breathing through his mouth, or why that gets in the way of his feeding. He doesn't know how to sniffle, just that the stuffy nose is frustrating. He woke up once an hour last night, screaming, confused at how his body is feeling. It's just a big old mess.

Before bed yesterday Nathan was sort-of-kind-of crying for a good 90 minutes, desperate for comfort and, I suspect, some sympathy. Use of the nasal aspirator (or, as it will forever be known to me, the booger baster) gave marked but short-lived relief. We spent the night rooting for him to get better quickly, unable to do much else.

Otherwise, Nathan just fusses here and there, and tries his best to find things funny. Which I suppose is not a bad place to be: even when he's down, our baby knows how to crack a smile.

When one's father is a die-hard fan of a sport and a team, it stands to reason, more often than not, that the child might become a fan too. (Never mind that I'm not a Knicks fan like my own dad; that's mostly because I don't like basketball all that much. My brother does love the Knicks. And I like my father don't have a favorite football team, so that's something.)

And when said father is a die-hard fan of the most storied franchise in American sports, one whose last season in a historic stadium is winding down this very weekend, it might stand to reason that father might feel compelled to show his son a little bit of history, a shared memory, even if the son is, say, 16 weeks old.

So if you find a high-definition television tomorrow, and turn on the Yankee game, and look to the third-base side of home plate, in the back of the lower level under the loge overhang, and you try real hard and squint a bit, you just might see little Nate, in his Yankees onesie and Yankees mocassins, taking in his first baseball game at the last weekend at the old Yankee Stadium, accompanied by his extraordinarily accommodating mother, and, of course, his proud, grinning dad.